Author and former celebrity yoga instructor Alanna Zabel is channeling personal betrayal into her latest children’s book, sparking fresh drama in the process. The target? The future Mrs. Jeff Bezos is someone that she used to spend hours on the phone and in person chatting it up.
Now, the only communication between the two is through lawyers.
Zabel, who once had a close friendship with Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, claims their relationship went from collaborative to contentious after she stole her idea. Between 2007 and 2011, Zabel taught Sánchez private yoga sessions, and the pair reportedly sparked a friendship and shared ideas, including plans to write a children’s book about an animal and space together.
In a lawsuit filed on Sept. 24, 2024, Zabel alleges the two had “oral and written discussions spanning sixteen years” about various projects. In 2022, Zabel says she pitched a story idea about a “cat who flies to Mars,” which she later published as “Dharma Kitty Goes to Mars.”
After her book’s release, Zabel reached out to Bezos, her friend’s billionaire boyfriend, offering to donate proceeds to the Bezos Earth Fund and the Bezos Academy. She says Bezos’ assistant confirmed her email was received but claims no arrangement ever materialized, Page Six reported.
But something else materialized.
In September 2024 Sánchez released her own children’s book, “The Fly Who Flew to Space.” For Zabel, the similarities of using an animal (dog vs. fly) and space travel were too glaring to ignore. She accused Sánchez of copying her idea and retaliated in two ways.
First, she filed a cease-in-desist letter in March and then the aforementioned lawsuit, which was withdrawn days later on Sept. 25, according to TMZ.
Second, particularly because she dropped her lawsuit, Zabel wrote a new book seemingly aimed at Sánchez. Titled “Sticky the Fly’s Web of Lies,” the story centers on Sticky Fly, an insect who steals credit for others’ work before being forced to apologize. Sources close to Zabel say the character is a thinly veiled jab at Sànchez.
The story also features Azra the Spider, a character believed to represent Zabel herself, as one of Sticky Fly’s victims. Though Sánchez’s name is never mentioned, the parallels between the book and the alleged feud are hard to miss. The fly even resembles Sánchez.
Some of the dialogue might as well be written by another insect, a bumblebee, because of how the words sting.
“Sticky was hiding from sight inside a tree stump. But she was listening to every word Azra said. ‘I will find a way to be just like her!’ she thought,” one page read.
The next morning, because dawn breaks, Sticky Fly devised a plan to snatch the spider’s web that Azra made.
She thought it would make her “wise,” and “moving like a silent ninja, she crept toward the delicate web, ready to claim it for herself.”
However, she was caught by the spider, who said, “You are special, Sticky… but you alone put the lies in flies. You’ve been so busy trying to be someone you’re not that you’ve trapped yourself in your own trickery.”
The lesson was that instead of trying to trick her way into making webs like the spider, she should return to the garden and do whatever it is that makes flies special. Another lesson was that everything, the work that she does as a spider and the work that the fly could be doing, requires work and that no one wins when they try to copy someone else’s styles or ideas.
“You may not make honey or spin webs, but the work you do in the garden is just as important,” the spider shared before Sticky Fly got stuck in Azra’s web.
“But why does everyone work so hard,” Sticky asked later in the book while still trapped in the web.
When Zabel posted the release of the book on her Aziam Yoga and Aziam Kids Instagram, she shared, “Sticky the Fly’s Web of Lies is a powerful book about an insecure little fly (Sticky Sly) who is so jealous of everyone else that she finds herself wrapped in a web of her own lies, and quite literally in Azra the Spider’s web! (She puts the ‘lies’ in ‘flies!’).”
The post limited its comments to just one IG user, who happens to be the story’s antagonist, Sticky Sly Fly, who posted three emojis: a spiderweb, a spider, and a ninja.
